JFM Rapids, is a well-established section in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics [JFM] that continues to provide a highly visible venue for short, high-quality, articles addressing timely research challenges of broad interest. In this annual collection, the editors of JFM Rapids each explain why they selected one article that presents exciting results with exceptional impact on currently active fluid mechanics research.

Read on to discover the selected articles and the editors’ insights:

• Experiments on water wave interactions with a horizontal submerged elastic plate by Gatien Polly, Alexis Merigaud, Benjamin Thiria, and Ramiro Godoy-Diana

Elisabeth Guazzelli: “This paper presents a novel experimental study of the interaction between water waves and an horizontal elastic plate that is clamped at one edge. The transmission and reflection coefficients are investigated for a range of wavelengths and amplitudes, indicating regimes that may offer enhanced performance in applications such as coastal protection when compared with a rigid plate. The findings presented in this paper contribute to our understanding of the potential applications of such elastic plates in wave energy harvesting and the attenuation of waves.“

• Relative dispersion in free-surface turbulence by Yaxing Li, Yifan Wang, Yinghe Qi, and Filippo Coletti

Detlef Lohse: “In 1926, Richardson released balloons into the atmosphere, to study their relative dispersion and thereby revealing the nature of three-dimensional atmospheric turbulence. However, the relative dispersion of particles floating on a turbulent free surface had been much less well understood, in spite of the relevance of this problem for a better understanding of the ocean contamination by plastics, and field experiments and numerical simulations had been inconclusive. With the help of a newly designed and built facility and phenomenal particle tracking techniques, in their Rapids Yaxing Li et al. could now shed new light on this problem, revealing new features of the relative particle dispersion on a turbulent free surface.”

• Velocity gradient partitioning in turbulent flows by Rahul Arun and Tim Colonius

Dan Henningson: “The paper discusses interesting novel applications of the partitioning of the velocity gradient tensor in turbulent flows, with the aim of making it possible to draw conclusions about how to improve turbulence modeling and how to connect statistical features to the turbulence structures that produce them.”

• Jetting enhancement from wall-proximal cavitation bubbles by a distant wall by Qingyun Zeng, A-Man Zhang, Beng Hau Tan, Hongjie An and Claus-Dieter Ohl

Lian-Ping Wang: “This paper studied the effect of an additional distant wall on the micro-jet formation by a collapsing cavitation bubble. This problem enjoys rich dynamics such as creation of large wall-normal shear stress and a wide range of practical applications. Combining careful numerical simulations and experimental data, the authors derived a valuable model to predict the micro-jet velocity in terms of three geometrical governing parameters, clearly showing the micro-jet enhancement by the distant wall. The finding could guide new applications, and the paper is expected to have a broader readership, thus a JFM Rapids.”

• Learning rheological parameters of non-Newtonian fluids from velocimetry data by Alexandros Kontogiannis, Richard Hodgkinson, Steven Reynolds, and Emily Manchester

Sarah Waters: “This exciting and innovative work,  combining theory and experiment,  infers the rheological parameters of a non-Newtonian fluid from velocity fields alone. Specifically, the authors solve a Bayesian-based inverse problem that assimilates velocimetry data of a shear-thinning fluid to jointly reconstruct the flow field and quantitatively determine its parameters.  This important and impactful study paves the way for determining rheological parameters from velocity data for a wealth of applications underpinned by complex fluid flows, including in biological and industrial fluid mechanics.”

• Super-resolution of turbulence with dynamics in the loss by Jacob Page

Tamer Zaki: “In this paper, Jacob Page elegantly combines ideas from variational data assimilation and machine learning in an algorithm that augments sparse measurements of turbulence.  The methodology exploits timely advancements in machine learning and the rigor of variational techniques, and the results demonstrate the impact of the measurement resolution and the influence of chaos on the accuracy of predicting turbulence.”

We hope these selected articles will inspire more researchers to submit their results to JFM Rapids.

Read these articles in one collection along with the chosen articles from previous years

Read previous blogs in this series:

• [2023] JFM Rapids: The Editors’ Insights
• JFM Rapids: The Editors’ Insights 2024

Concise, high impact research in Journal of Fluid Mechanics

• Fast: First decision in 30 days
• Concise: Clear and complete 10-page articles
• Timely: Exciting results with exceptional impact
• Dedicated: Editors deal exclusively with Rapids submissions
• Streamlined: Prioritised peer review and rapid online publication